The motivation behind such an ambitious project is the inevitable future of mass cyber-attacks on nuclear power stations, energy supply and transportation control facilities, financial and telecommunications systems. Until a few years ago cyber attacks were limited to web servers and emails server, however that has changed and now the very infrastructure that controls our countries is open for attack.

Industrial IT systems are different to office system and internet facing server for three very important reasons:

The system must always be running. If a web server is under attack, worst case scenario is that the server is shutdown until everything can be resolved. You can’t do that with the control system running a nuclear power station!

Because of the “always on” nature of the systems, performing software upgrades are difficult and often undesired by those running the systems.

Traditionally the ICS manufacturers have been less willing to provide updates to existing control system.

The result is that when an exploit is found in the control system, fixing it can be very hard.

The fact that the majority of control systems aren’t connected to the Internet could lull us into a false sense of security as how could a hacker possibility get to the system if it isn’t connected to anything. Unfortunately the reality is quite different. Kaspersky gives the following example from twelve years ago:

An employee of a third-party contractor who was working on the control systems of Maroochy Shire Council (in Australia) carried out 46 (!) attacks on its control system, which caused the pumps to stop working or work not as they should have. No one could understand what was happening, since the communication channels inside the system had been breached and the information traveling along them distorted. Only after months did companies and the authorities manage to work out what had happened. It turned out that the worker really wanted to get a job at the sewage firm, was rejected, and so decided to flood a huge area of Queensland with sewage!

And this long before the rise of cyber espionage malware like Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame, miniflame and Gauss.

“Ideally, all ICS software would need to be rewritten, incorporating all the security technologies available and taking into account the new realities of cyber-attacks,” wrote Kaspersky.

However, such a huge project effort would still not guarantee sufficiently stable operation of systems. The alternative is to create a a secure operating system, one onto which ICS can be installed. To do this Kaspersky Lab are developing a highly tailored operating system for a specific narrow task. It is not, as Kaspersky put it “for playing Half-Life on, editing your vacation videos, or blathering on social media.”

Also the company is working on methods of writing software which, by design, won’t be able to carry out any behind-the-scenes, undeclared activity.

“It’s a sophisticated project, and almost impracticable without active interaction with ICS operators and vendors. We can’t reveal many details of the project now because of the confidentiality of such cooperation. And we don’t want to talk about some stuff so competitors won’t jump on our ideas and nick the know-how. And then there are some details that will remain for certain customers’ eyes only forever, to ward off cyber-terrorist abuses,” added Kaspersky.

More details about the system, its requirements and background to its development can be read here.

(LiveHacking.Com) – Kaspersky Lab has found a new piece of malware that is linked with the various nation-state cyber-espionage malware including Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame and Gauss. Although found all over the world, these malware attacks have specifically targeted the Middle East. Previous analysis of the Flame malware led Kaspersky Lab that there was some form of collaboration between the groups that developed Flame, Stuxnet and Duqu. Further research prompted the discovery of the previously unknown malware called Gauss which uses a modular structure resembling that of Flame, has a similar code base and uses the same system for communicating with its C&C servers. The made the whole family: Flame, Stuxnet, Duqu and Gauss.

Now Kaspersky Lab has discovered miniFlame. This new malware is based on the Flame platform and can be operated as part of Flame, but it can also be run as independently, without the main Flame modules installed.

“The SPE malware, is a small, fully functional espionage module designed for data theft and direct access to infected systems. If Flame and Gauss were massive spy operations, infecting thousands of users, miniFlame/SPE is a high precision, surgical attack tool,” wrote GReAT a Kaspersky Lab Expert.

Kaspersky Lab have also discovered that miniFlame can also be used in together with Gauss. It has also been assumed that Flame and Gauss were parallel projects but different as they did not have any common modules or common C&C servers. The fact that miniFlame works with both of these malware projects, proves that that they come from the same authors.

Like the others in the family, miniFlame is targeting the Middle East. Flame attacks where found mainly in Iran and Sudan, while Gauss was mostly present in Lebanon. However miniFlame does not have a clear geographical bias but there are reports from Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Kuwait and Qatar.

(LiveHacking.Com) – In the ongoing saga, which started with Stuxnet and continued with Duqu and Flame, Gauss is seen by many as malware which, like its predecessors, is state sponsored. It was discovered during the ITU’s investigation into Flame and is thought to have been created in mid-2011 and deployed for the first time in August-September of the same year.

The major difference between Stuxnet and its cousins is that Gauss is a banking Trojan and is designed to steal login details for customers of Lebanese banks including Bank of Beirut, EBLF, BlomBank, ByblosBank, FransaBank and Credit Libanais. It also targets users of Citibank and PayPal. Kaspersky lab have gone as far as to say “This is actually the first time we’ve observed a nation-state cyber-espionage campaign with a banking Trojan component.”

It has now been discovered that computers infected with Gauss all have a previously unknown font, known as “Palida Narrow”, installed on them. Security researchers have linked Duqu to Gauss, due to some similar characteristics, and have wondered if Gauss uses the same font rendering vulnerability as Duqu. However Kaspersky has checked the font for such malicious code and found nothing: “But of course, anything is possible”.

However the new font can be used as a marker for the presence of the malware and to this end the Cryptography Laboratory at the Technical University of Budapest has created a web page to test for Palida and hence Gauss.